With 'Gone Home', Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja are gaming the 90s

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Game developers Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja worked on

Minerva's Den, a game set in the fantastic, retro-futuristic undersea city of Rapture, home of the BioShock franchise. Now, at their indie startup The Fullbright Company, they are building a game set in a yet more inexplicable environment: the 90s.

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Gallery: With 'Gone Home', Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja are gaming the 90s

ByDaniel Nye Griffiths

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We got a Sears catalogue from 1992 on eBay, full of ghastly furniture and turned them into 3D modelsSteve Gaynor "We wanted to pick a time without mobile phones or home internet, so all the clues could be artefacts -- receipts and notes people left for each other," explains Gaynor, 30. "But we didn't want to go so far back that we lost the personal connection."

In Gone Home, the player investigates a suburban home in Oregon (where The Fullbright Company is based), piecing together what happened to its missing inhabitants. Zimonja, 35, found design inspiration in the American consumer's Bible: "We got a Sears catalogue from 1992 on eBay, full of ghastly furniture. We scanned things from that and then Kate Craig, our environment artist, turned them into 3D models." Gaynor adds: "The core lies in a place that feels familiar and believable. It's all about being immersed in the atmosphere."